Working Papers
“Designing Gender Equity: Evidence from Hiring Practices”
Abstract: I combine novel data on job applications and hiring decisions for the universe of public sector jobs in Brazil and a natural experiment that decreased discretion in hiring to analyze how screening determines gender application and hiring gaps. I find that hiring practices have crucial gender equity consequences for selection and sorting, and not all approaches to reduce discretion have the same implications. Limiting discretion in existing tools or adding new impartial tools reduce the gender hiring gap by a third. However, policies that eliminate subjective tools like interviews are ineffective, suggesting employers should carefully weigh bias-information trade-offs.
“Personal Connections and Hiring Decisions in the Public Sector” (with Eleonora Patacchini)
“Beyond Tuition: College Cost Accuracy and Student Outcomes”
Abstract: This paper goes beyond the focus of the college affordability debate on tuition and studies how living expenses affect the human capital accumulation of US college students. Cost of living (COL) allowances reported by colleges are a substantial part of cost of attendance, which limits federal loan and grant amounts. Without regulation or oversight, self-reported college COL estimates considerably differ from local cost benchmarks, with under-reporting particularly pervasive in for-profits. Exploiting within-university variation in levels of reported living costs, I show that under-reporting in for-profits lowers student aid received by students, increases dropout rates, and incentivizes excessive enrollment of low-income individuals. By having all universities follow standardized COL estimates and making the average under-estimating for-profit university perfectly accurate, dropout rates would decrease by 15%.
Published Papers
“The Impact of International Students on Housing Markets” (with Pedro Tremacoldi-Rossi)
Canadian Journal of Economics, 2023
Abstract: We study the impact of the 2005-2015 international student boom in US universities on local housing markets. By constructing a sample of American college towns characterizing rarely studied local markets in small urban areas, we show that international students exogenously sustained demand for rentals and residential investment, representing countercyclical shocks during the Great Recession. Exploiting the historical distribution of foreign enrollment across college towns and country-of-origin networks, we find that international students increased rents by 1.3% and home prices by 2.5% relative to the housing boom peak, translating into home equity gains of $4,000. An analysis exploiting within-city dynamics reveals that neighborhoods near campus absorbed international inflows by replacing single-family homes with apartment rentals.
Selected Work in Progress
“Unions, Strikes, and the Quality of Public Education Provision” (with Oto Montagner & Pedro Tremacoldi-Rossi)
Abstract: Strikes are a common part of union action on behalf of public sector workers in many countries. Can increased wages and resources obtained through collective bargaining improve the quality of publicly provisioned services and offset losses associated with the stoppage? Exploiting the common occurrence of union-led faculty strikes in Brazilian universities, during which teaching activities are completely suspended, we study the effects of strikes on student achievement. Comparing exit and entry exam scores of students from the same major and college exposed to different degrees of learning interruption, we find that each additional strike month lowers 7 positions in the learning rank and increases both dropout rates and time to graduation. Linking exam scores to longitudinal student microdata reveals that these effects concentrate on students of lower income, more likely to work, and who studied in lower-quality high schools. Leveraging post-exit exam surveys, we find that a large part of the observed decrease in performance is attributed by students to lower levels of major satisfaction and perception of value-added, as well as commitment of faculty with teaching, effort, and tutoring. Even when union demands are met, neither increased wages nor greater instructional resources result in higher performance of students unaffected by strikes. Strikes of other professional groups such as non-instructional staff or of short duration have no effects on any student outcomes, ruling out alternative channels explaining our results. We estimate that strikes in public universities, where education is offered tuition-free, have an annual tax-equivalent cost due to longer time to degree of over $300 million, amounting to almost a third of the total funding to public colleges.